BLOOMING PRAIRIE, Minnesota — In 2014, Lowell Trom hit a breaking point.

For two decades, he had watched as his small farming community in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was taken over by hog factory farms. The first one was built in 1993. Five years later, another one went up. By 2014, there were 10, housing around 24,000 pigs within a three-mile radius of the 760-acre property where he grew corn and soybeans.

Many were raising hogs for Holden Farms, a midsized pork company, according to his daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs.

The millions of gallons of waste that the pigs generated each year stank horribly and polluted the air and water, turning an otherwise pleasant town into a pigsty. The trucks that brought in feed for the hogs or loaded them up for trips to the slaughterhouse tore up the town’s narrow roads.

So when Dodge County approved a permit for another hog factory farm in 2014, “My dad said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Trom Eayrs told me. That year, Lowell sued the Dodge County Board of Commissioners and two people affiliated with the proposed farm, arguing that the county had issued the permit despite lacking critical information, like how it would handle all the manure.

“As soon as they started that lawsuit, that’s when the harassment started” from members of the local hog community, Trom Eayrs said. “The intimidation and the midnight calls to my dad … garbage in our road ditches and bullet holes in the stop sign” near their home, she remembered, and “lots of other tactics that were done to try and harass us and get us to shut up.” (Trom Eayrs doesn’t allege county officials had engaged in these tactics.)

Lowell Trom prevailed in that first lawsuit, which vacated the hog farm’s permit. In response, the county watered down the permit application requirements and approved the factory farm once again. Trom sued again, challenging the issuance of the second permit, which failed. A similar third lawsuit against a neighboring township and a hog farm operator, in which Trom argued the township had improperly approved a permit, also failed. There are now 12 hog factory farms within three miles of the Trom family property. Lowell died in 2019.

Holden Farms didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Trom’s family story, along with the story of how factory farms have reshaped US agriculture, are recounted in Trom Eayrs’s compelling new book, Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America. Trom Eayrs also documented similar stories of harassment experienced by fellow Midwesterners — all farmers themselves — who’ve protested factory farms coming into their towns: a bullet into a toddler’s bedroom window; arson; dead animals left on someone’s car, in their mailbox, and their front porch; and plenty of death threats.

One family in Illinois found a severed pig’s head in their front yard after they complained about factory farm odors.

Such harassment and intimidation isn’t confined to Middle America. Over 1,000 miles away in Eastern North Carolina, where nearly all farm owners are white and affected residents are disproportionately low-income people of color, those who criticize factory farms have reported owners and employees following them in their cars, driving back and forth in front of their homes, threatening physical violence, and nearly running people over who were testing potentially polluted water by the roadside.

Elsie Herring, who over time became the face of the movement against North Carolina’s farm pollution, got it especially bad. In the mid-1990s, the hog factory farm next door to her mother’s house began to spray manure on nearby cropland as fertilizer. But some of the manure would land on her mother’s property — even onto the exterior of the house. Herring complained to local, state, and federal authorities, which she said led to aggression from the hog farm owner.

One day, Herring wrote in a 2019 testimony to Congress, the farm owner’s son entered her home uninvited and shook the chair her 98-year-old mother was sitting in, and yelled that he could do whatever he wanted to Herring and get away with it. On two occasions, the farm owner’s son showed up to her home with a gun.

“I live under a threat of intimidation and harassment that feels constant,” Herring, who died from cancer in 2021, told Congress.

The lawyers, scientists, politicians, and environmental advocates who work with communities to fight factory farm pollution have sometimes also found themselves the........

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